Hey guys and gals! Welcome to another week of Sam and Dan Games. This week we have some sneak peak at the Creature Universe Starters and the weekly progress for what will be new in Pokemon Tower Defense 2 this week. Enjoy!

Creature Universe (aka ANPO) Starters:Okay so every creature game should start with the trainers getting their first creature. In pokemon you started in one town and you picked from three different starters. In most games in the series you could pick from a grass, fire or water pokemon. My first thoughts in designing ANPO were "okay why not have different types available? Why not have all types available?" I thought it would be great if you wanted a specific type to be your starting type. Why only have 3 choices? Then I said "wouldn't it be cool if each starter had a different starting location?" What if since each city specializes in a certain type why not have a starter on each city and have players decide which city they wanted to start from. That all sounded great! But then I came back to earth and thought about how many different types we might have and about how long it would take to make all those cities right from the start. Okay so I like the idea of different cities for each starter. I like the idea of letting you choose which type you want to start. But to release the game I have to limit how many starters I will release the game with. So let's go back down to 3 and then as the game progresses we will add more. Okay so 3 starter types for 3 cities. The starters will be like that cities mascot. They will be an important part of that city. That is the creature that young trainers from that city receive when they first start training.

Now which 3 types should it start with? My first thoughts were to not do fire, grass, and water. Let's make it different! WOOOO! How about flying, ground, electric? Hmm it doesn't quite work out... Flying isn't super effective against ground... Also it's not that intuitive to figure out who beats who... not as nice as fire, grass, and water. So I decided okay I want more than 3 types for starters but if I only have 3 types then they will be fire, grass, and water. So a few weeks back I had my artist, Kevin, Bill, Evan, Josh and Joel, start coming up with concepts for creatures for ANPO. We have over 100 designs already! But I like to present to you the work in progress sketches of the water, fire, and grass starters for ANPO!

Work In Progress ANPO Starters

Weekly Progress:This week for PTD 2 will we have another 1v1 level, this level should be enough for kakuna and metapod to level up to 10 so I will include the unlocks for those. Also I'll be pushing for saving in the story mode and the second quest where you can actually pick your starter. Plus if I have time during the week I'll add any small fixes or changes that I find.

Alpha v1.14 Added the Girl Avatar for story mode, saving for story mode, Bug Fixes and Changes (9/2/12): Released!

Fixed a bug that was making attacks that should do at least 1 damage do 0 damage - Like Poison Sting on Geodude

Fixed a bug that prevented a pokemon from learning an attack when it evolves and you beat a level

Fixed a bug with attacks with an initial cooldown having a cooldown glitch

Removed Prof Oak's winning text and added different text in Story Level 1

Added Johto Starter sounds to the Story Level 1 Intro

Added the correct lost popup to Story Level 1

Implemented the girl avatar in story mode

Fixed being able to enter houses through windows and walls in Story mode

Lowered the Geodude's level in Level 6 of 1v1 to 10, 11, 12 respectively, also lowered the amount of buffs they do before attacking

Gave Professor Oak the correct questions to ask the player on Story Level 1 Intro

Fixed a bug with beating a level while playing at a higher speed

Added properly deleting profiles when the delete button is pressed

Added saving your story profile

Alpha v1.13 New Level, Bug Fixes and Changes (8/28/12): Released!

1v1 Level 6

Intro

Level Layout

Waves

Ending

Added Butterfree and Beedrill as unlockables

Lower the effect of speed changes to attack speed

Update speed changes to attack cooldown in real time instead of only when a new move is going to be done

That's all I have for you this week, keep checking back to see how I am progressing on the update, and let me know what you think of the starters and the weekly progress in the comments below or on twitter.Thanks!

Countdown to PTD 2 Story Mode -The next release of PTD 2 will have the very first quest, below you will find out the progress that I need to accomplish to reach this release. More things will be added and updated as I work on the game. Keep coming back to see my progress.

New Story Level! Pokemon Center update! v1.12 (08/24/12): Released now!

Added a new title screen made by our artist Kevin!

Level 1 quest - Dream Training

Intro

Level Layout

Level Waves

Ending

Add story profile screen

Walking around feature

Collision map- Setting the hitboxes on level objects.

Level Boundaries - Levels won't scroll past their edge.

Character Boundaries - Your character will stay in the middle of the screen until it hits the edge of a level then it will be able to keep walking to the edge.

Added Depth Sorting to Level Objects - Depth will now be sorted for all objects in the map.

Create New Bark Town Map

Create Forest Spot Map

Create Lab Map

Create Your House Map

Your Room

Family Room

Create Other House Maps

Connect different map together - Allows for entering into a different area.

Story Mode Graphics will now be from the GBA games instead of the DS games - The DS graphics are not easily available like the GBA graphics.

Pokemon Center

Added a much requested feature to the Pokemon Center! You can now search for trades that must have a request, or not have a request or both!

New Level, Bug Fixes, New Additions v1.11 (08/17/12)

Added the pokemon's current attacks to the "Buy Pokemon" screen

Fixed a bug in level 3 pokemon getting whiter if you keep bringing them in and out

Added missing attacks to Pikachu (Tail Whip) and Spearow(Leer)

Removed Butterfree and Beedrill unlockables until you can earn enough experience to reach level 10

Added a small global cooldown (0.6 sec) when a pokemon is placed on the field, this will prevent pokemon from attacking instantly upon their arrival, it also gives the opponent a possible free hit when you are swapping pokemon

Fixed a stacking graphical bug on the party screen

HTD Status Update - Essentially Hero Tower Defense has been put on indefinite hold. We still love the idea and would love to start it up again but a number of things didn't work out for this project. We went for a high quality of hand drawn graphics that we thought we could achieve in a short time but the reality is that these graphics will take years in man hours to create and we don't have the resources to complete them. This is why we switched to 3D graphics but with our limited resources this was still an issue. If HTD comes back it will have a very simplistic style similar to the mobile game BattleHeart. Another big issue is that I'm the only programmer and my time is split between PTD and HTD. With PTD 1 being over my deal with Dan was to move to HTD more full time and only do PTD2 part time. But because of the graphic issues and the slow speed of development I didn't really have a choice but to move to PTD 2 at full force. (Also you guys wanted PTD2 more!) It is really hard to code two different engines at the same time. Even if they are the same genre (tower defense). Like I said I do hope this game will come back at some point in some shape or another.ANPO has evolved! -ANPO or Creatures Universe has evolved! I left a secret label in the blog post but nobody seemed to notice, and if they did they didn't mention it. "nadpto" if you change it around becomes "anpotd"! If you read the HTD update you will note that I said building two engines is hard work. Work that I don't have the time or resources to do right now. So I had this grand idea to expand PTD2 and have an overworld and seeing pokemon in the wild. Those are ideas from ANPO. So why not use the same engine that PTD 2 will use and have our designers come up with new creatures, new stories, new attacks, new abilities, and new graphics for all of these to make a new game? This is the idea of ANPO TD (Creatures Universe TD). What this means is I get to focus fully on PTD2's engine and I get 2 different games out of it. For you it means you get to have PTD2 faster than if we worked on a different full game at the same time and you get a whole new game a long with it! The games will have many differences so don't think this is just a quick re-skin. We plan to have a Kickstarter for it to help us out with paying the designers and being able to keep you entertained. What do you think?Thanks guys for the continued support, we have great things coming your way that I hope you will be excited for, I know you are all looking forward to the story mode (look at that poll!) so I'm doing my best to get it to you while still providing you with updates.